They started life 25 years ago as carphones - because you needed a car to take the weight of the battery - and cost a fortune, but today there are more mobile phones in the UK than there are people. On the way to becoming ubiquitous, the mobile phone handset has gone through dramatic changes
The first "mobile" phones were hardly mobile at all. They were handsets attached to a large and heavy battery, such as this Motorola 4500x. Costing well over £1,000 and with little more than 20 minutes of talktime before the battery ran out, it is easy to see why even the experts thought they would never be anything more than a niche product for the very rich.
Photograph: Salford University
The Guardian
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